Functional medicine is a systems biology-based approach that focuses on identifying and addressing the root cause of disease. Each symptom or differential diagnosis can be one of many that contribute to a person's illness. I think that if the medication you practice does no harm and the patient gets good results, it should be acceptable. The most functional approach to medicine involves figuring out what doesn't work within an individual, not a collection of individuals who could have the same disease due to radically different genetic configurations, medical histories, and lifestyles.
Functional medicine physicians use specialized training and techniques to find the root causes of complex diseases. Naturopaths identify as causing the body to heal independently of any type of substance, whether natural or synthetic, while FM doctors use medications, both pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical. Herbst helped the Cleveland Clinic develop and expand the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine (CCCFM). As you master today's traditional traditional medicine in the U.S.
In the US, you will discover that Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine have existed for approximately 5000 years and have healed masses of people. Herbst's search for functional medicine was very successful and led to work to help the Cleveland Clinic start up its fledgling Center for Functional Medicine. All doctors take the patient's medical history, but what makes the functional medicine timeline different is that it has the effect of giving the patient insight into past life events to motivate them to change and participate in treatment. Functional medicine doctors in my geographic area use devices not approved by the FDA to diagnose things through the skin.
Conventional medicine primarily recognizes the symptoms you experience and uses the same symptoms to identify a disease and develop a treatment plan. It's deceptive to push patients toward functional medicine when they don't really need it; this approach also costs the system much more money due to the number of tests that are requested and the individual patient's associated interactions with doctors. Yes, I will individualize treatment based on osteopathic examinations, but osteopathy and functional medicine are not and should not be synonymous. After practicing conventional medicine as a psychiatrist for 22 years, on my journey to recover my son's health, I knew that I couldn't unlearn what I had learned in the process and return to the way I was treating my patients.
A functional medicine doctor will research and treat each cause, leading to a personalized treatment approach. Conventional medicine merely examines individual symptoms and assumes that they are related to various parts of the body.
